photo by Alex Lear
TRUMPET DREAMS
Somewhere in America a young person looks at a trumpet. Ok, maybe they are not actually looking at a physical instrument. Maybe they are dreaming about a trumpet. Dreaming about playing a trumpet—the bell held high, gleaming in the sun, and people are dancing, and laughing, and shouting. Every riff played brings joy. Every move the dancers make in response, inspires our musician to higher heights of trumpetry.
All across America, many young people dream of becoming a great musician, but unless they are from New Orleans that dream does not include hundreds of people dancing as an integral part of a funeral procession. That dream is not playing “Big Fat Woman” in a Zulu Parade or “Ain’t Got No Food Stamps” outside the “Brown Derby” on Freret Street, or swinging through Treme playing “Atomic Dog” in homage to a neighborhood stray who has passed away—literally a canine who everyone loved and no one owned, or so it seemed.
This is a culturally specific dream grounded in a post-reconstruction tradition that began at the turn of 20th century and was drowned at the turn of the 21st century.
That first trumpeter, or at least the one most remembered, was Charles “Buddy” Bolden whom legend says you could hear clean across the river. Country born, city-bred Buddy Bolden is the man credited with starting jazz as we know it, and though the mythology of jazz perpetrated by popular jazz critics would point you to the brothels of Storyville as the cradle of jazz, the truth is that most of the music was played outdoors in the parks and streets of New Orleans, parading through the community or at picnics and Sunday outings. One famous gathering spot was Johnson Park, which was adjacent to Lincoln Park, located in the section of the city known as Gert Town, across the canal from where Xavier University is now. Some of the well-established Creole bands of trained musicians would play in one park and Buddy Bolden and his rough and tumble aggregation of literal “dark town strutters” would be in the other park. A battle royale would ensue. Buddy’s mixture of ragtime and blues always won.
Eventually Buddy Bolden was remaindered by the authorities to a mental institution on the other side of Lake Ponchartrain, the same lake which put an end to Buddy’s reign in the early 1900’s would rise up and swamp Buddy’s great-great-grandchildren in the early 2000’s.
After Buddy, Freddie Keppard was the guy most folk name as the standard bearer. RCA Victor offered him the opportunity to be the first man to record a jazz record. He refused, fearful that if he made a platter, then people would steal his music. They say Freddie would even drape a handkerchief over his horn so others couldn’t see how he fingered his notes. This stubborn, albeit, futile pride manifested itself repeatedly whenever a healthy percentage of people refused to leave the city in the face of oncoming hurricanes. But just as Freddie’s refusal came to naught—trumpeter Nick Larocca, the leader of the Original Dixieland Jass Band, was the first to record a jazz recording and thereby established forever that jazz was founded by Italian musicians, and not by Negroes—in a similar way, those who wanted to stay soon found themselves overwhelmed and almost everyone was forced out of the city.
If this mythical kid dreaming of trumpet glory had studied the music, he certainly knew that King Oliver was the next trumpet great. Oliver traveled across the then new land called America, coast to coast. One of the iconic photographs of King Oliver and band was taken on the sidewalks of San Francisco. Coming rather early in the era of recordings, most of what comes down to us is but a pale sliver of sound compared to the reputation of the king, whose most lasting claim to fame was as a teacher and father figure for someone often considered the greatest jazz musician of all time: “Louis Satchelmouth” Armstrong.
Over the course of a long, long career that included hits in the 1950s, Armstrong grew to be affectionately known as “Pops” because he shouldered the responsibility of caring for and about at least three generations of jazz musicians. While Pop’s artistry as a trumpeter and vocalist will last as long as American culture lasts, what most of his fellow musicians valued most was the unstinting support he offered, including but not limited to, gifts of money when someone was down on their luck.
For the first half of the 20th century, you couldn’t get no bigger than Pops, couldn’t be more loved, nor more welcomed worldwide. So when our kid is dreaming, undoubtedly the youngster envisions becoming as renown and loved as Pops was.
Armstrong’s shadow was so big that although he came along before the Harlem Renaissance, and although there were numerous other great jazz trumpeters including Bunk Johnson, who like Bolden came from the countryside, or Henry Red Allen (from Algiers, which is the part of New Orleans located on the west bank of the river), or Joe Newman, a stalwart of the Basie band, few knew that Joe was a New Orleans trumpeter, all of the brass men such as the aforementioned and many others notwithstanding, they were all dwarfed by the towering eminence of Louis Armstrong.
Within jazz in general there would be no serious challenge to Armstrong’s reign as the trumpet king until the meteoric rise of Dizzy Gillespie and the marathonic consistency of Miles Davis, both of whom would be eclipsed by another young man with a horn, another product of the New Orleans dream: Wynton Marsalis. And just as Pops was not the first, Wynton is not the last, yet equally they are the acknowledged masters of the jazz trumpets, bookends at the beginning and end of the 20th century.
Those who came before Pops are recognized in the chronicles of jazz, but as far as the general public is concerned, Armstrong is the first great name of jazz, and most certainly the first great jazz trumpeter. In a similar way, although a slew of significant trumpeters have followed Wynton—Terrence Blanchard, who would make a great name for himself scoring films, and Nicholas Payton, who physically resembles Pops and who is perhaps the fiercest soloist active on his chosen instrument—nevertheless, it is Wynton that the general public knows and defers to in matters jazz.
Pops appeared on television more than any other jazz musician prior to Wynton Marsalis, who became the authority when he was presented as the chief narrator and guide for Ken Burns’ award winning, multi-hour jazz documentary delineating the birth and development of America’s leading contribution to world culture.
At some level, our dreamer probably wishes to be considered more than merely an entertainer. Our dreamer would love to help sustain the community and also would love to be recognized as an articulate commentator on this beloved music.
While all of our dreamers want to be known worldwide, some of them never dream of leaving home. A significant number have flat-out refused to leave and thus they are relatively unknown outside of New Orleans. Have you heard of Kermit Ruffins, who started off in the Rebirth Brass Band and went on to become a social institution as both a jazz musician and a cook (Pops love of red beans and rice was embodied by Kermit), and then there’s Irving Mayfield who followed Wynton in much the same way Pops followed King Oliver. Irving even lived in Wynton’s apartment while studying with Wynton—today, Irving has made a name for himself not just as a trumpeter but also as a bandleader and as the city-government-sanctioned, official jazz ambassador of New Orleans. Or there is James “12” Andrews who can do an uncanny Armstrong impersonation, and don’t overlook 12’s younger sibling Troy (affectionately known as Trombone Shorty, who started out on trombone before switching to trumpet). Today Troy plays with Lenny Kravitz. And just as life goes on, there are others, other young dreamers with a horn.
Why has New Orleans produced so many important jazz musicians in general and trumpet players in particular? Is it something in the water, in the food, in the hot, humid air or is there some sociological rationale for a seemingly endless production of jazz trumpeters? Well its all of the above and none of the above. It’s a way of life in New Orleans.
Harold Battiste, Jr. is a New Orleans musician of countless accomplishments. He was the musical director for the Sonny & Cher television show as well as the often uncredited producer of all of the duo’s gold records. Battiste was the arranger for Sam Cooke’s first big hit, “You Send Me,” and the producer for the birth of the New Orleans legendary artist Dr. John. But more germane to this particular discussion, Battiste was the founder of AFO records in the mid-sixties, one of the first, if not the first, wholly Black owned jazz recording label. AFO’s big hit was “I Know” by Barbara George that included a famous solo by Melvin Lastie, which became a standard one had to master if one wanted to consider one’s self a New Orleans trumpeter. Harold Battiste composed the solo that his good friend Lastie played.
Typical of what seems to Topsy-like “just happen” down in the Big Easy, the truth is that it’s the result of careful planning and execution. Battiste who teaches jazz combo, composing and arranging at the University of New Orleans in the jazz studies department insightfullly opines that the success of their program is not because of the school but because of the city. The New Orleans music community offers the young student a place within a community of jazz musicians and a myriad of opportunities to play jazz in many different styles, at a frequency and a depth of shared experienced unrivaled by any other American metropolis.
It’s not simply on-the-job-training, it’s a traditional way of life that is lived everyday. You learn how to play funky by playing in the streets, not from listening to records or following the dictates of an instructor in the classroom. At a secondline, or other traditional street performance, if you don’t play well, you’ll find yourself playing to yourself—people will literally walk away—or else they will talk over your meaningless musings. The streets are a hard taskmaster. People who have heard generations and generations of music are not easily seduced by empty technique. You have to bring the noise, in order to be heard.
And if the discipline of a hip audience was not enough, the other factor is that you find yourself playing in the company of musicians who may have played what you’re struggling to play for twenty years before you were even born. The multi-generational schooling that takes place in a New Orleans jazz band can only happen because the music transcends the contemporary infatuation with youth culture. Some of the music is over a hundred years old. And although new ideas and new ways of playing do enter the tradition, the old ways have never died—they may be modified over time, but they have never died.
The youngster who would be king has to master a tradition before blazing new paths. This is what Wynton Marsalis found out. Initially he started off as a post-bop trumpeter, but over time he was force to recognize the mountain of New Orleans musical traditions. Wynton knew that if he wanted to be truly great, he must first learn the greatness that preceded him.
And now we are at the end of an era. For the first time in the history of New Orleans jazz, a youngster who dreams of becoming the next king will not be able to follow in the footsteps of the masters. Our dreamer will no longer be able to parade through the streets of Treme with a spontaneous crowd of two hundred people in tow.* The little neighborhood joints are no more. The old master who has seen over sixty summers no longer lives around the corner. You can’t get together with a bunch of your high school friends and play for block parties on the weekend—indeed this year there will be no high school football games where the band rocks the stands. No Sundays on the lake front. No street festivals uptown in Central City or downtown in the Ninth Ward. There’s still the French Quarter itself but without the tradition buttressing it, what goes on in that roughly 12-square-block area is a pale imitation of life rather than the real deal—the vibrant, funky, Blackness of New Orleans culture.
Of course, one could make the same analysis of the food, or the visual arts, the social organizations and the lively vernacular of New Orleans. A way of life has been washed away because the people who created and continued that way of life have been “saved” and sent away, evacuated literally all over the country.
In Utah is there a hundred year-old tradition of parading in the streets that our dreamer can join? In Boston they bake beans, but can they make red beans and rice—indeed do they even have red beans in Boston? Somewhere in Minnesota our dreamer is going to go looking for a snowball in the summertime and people are not going to know anything about finely shaved ice saturated with a myriad of fruit-flavored syrups. Even in Shreveport, Louisiana, less than four hundred miles from home, one will not hear the boom of a bass drum and the hot blare of a trumpet celebrating and memorializing the life of a friend, one will not be able to respond by jumping up and joining the dancing procession.
It is not the thing itself, but the tradition that produced the thing; not jazz as a music form but the attitude and behaviors of the people, that is what kept the culture alive; not a particular song but indeed a whole approach to singing, that is what has been lost in the flood waters.
Somewhere a youngster dreams of being a trumpet king, of carrying on a tradition—now that New Orleans is no more, is there any other place where the trumpet tradition lives, and, if not, can the tradition be reborn in the new New Orleans? Can traditions continue to exist amid the absence of the people who created and sustained those traditions? Is a dream and a dreamer enough, or do we need a land of dreams, way down yonder in New Orleans?
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* This essay was written in 2006. Since that time something worst has “quietly” happened. By 2010 street musicians are banned by city ordinance from performing after 8pm. Brass bands parading without an expensive permit have been literally arrested. The spontaneous street culture of New Orleans that spawned jazz and supplied a seemingly endless supply of trumpet giants has been effectively censored and silenced.
—kalamu ya salaam
